God and Your Expectations: Following God When Life Makes No Sense

There are several sons of John the Baptist…and here’s one of them (points to himself). And I have a notion there are one or two out here somewhere. He will not always do what you expect him to do. He won’t even do what he promises to do sometimes. Oh, Gene, that’s heresy. I know it’s heresy, but it’s true nonetheless. You and I get a certain impression of what God is like, all these sermons these Baptist preachers preach to you, and then one day God steps out of that mold and does not perform that way, and the world begins coming down on you.

I’m gonna say this to you again. It would be really good to have some answers, but folks, I’m going to tell you something. John’s not going to get them, and if a man could deserve answers from God, if he could earn them from God, it would be John.

I want you to go back, just for a moment, to John’s life. He’s eight years old. He looks up to his mother, Elizabeth, and says, “Mother, God has spoken to me. Never put a razor to my hair. I have been called to be a Nazarene.” Now that would befuddle any mother…except Elizabeth, because she remembers his incredibly inordinate conception and birth. Angels had something to do with John’s birth. His daddy was struck dumb. He got a strange name that no one was familiar with.

At the age of 14, he comes to his mother, and he says, “Mother, God has spoken to me, and I am to leave home, and I am to go and live in the wilderness for the rest of my life until God tells me otherwise. I will go there and live among the caves, and I will pray, fast, and wait on God. I will live as do the hermits there, the Essenes, and others, and I will wait, for God has something to tell me.”

Elizabeth consented to it because she had given that child to God before the child was conceived, and she knew He had some ordination in his life. By the time John had reached 30, his skin was bronzed and as hard as leather. He has spent most of his life in prayer, fasting, and seeking the face of God. He has been eating things that are unclean by Jewish law. He eats locusts, and he wears something unclean – camel’s hair. He’s a somber, sober, serious human being.

One day again, God speaks to this man who has lived this austere life for God. And God says to him, “Go and preach repentance to Israel and baptize them. But do it in the desert. If anybody wants to hear you, they’re going to have to come to you. Don’t go to the marketplace. Don’t go to the cities. Don’t go to the villages. Don’t even go into the pasture lands. Go out into the hot, steaming desert.”

And there, where temperatures can reach 170, John the Baptist begins to thunder out God’s proclamation to caravans passing by. Word of the strange creature reaches into the villages, into the small towns, and the people come out because they are seeking. It’s an ordinary generation that normally would have never even listened to the voice of God, but John literally takes it and changes and turns that generation to be the generation of all generations.

And the people come first in dribbles, then in hundreds, then in thousands, then in tens of thousands. First from a mile, then five miles, then twenty miles, then fifty miles. Some people trek for days to hear this man preach, and they repent, and their souls are shredded. There are men who follow him. They, too, live austerely, and John begins to gather around him hundreds of disciples who are waiting for him to give a clear word about the coming of a Messiah.

Then one day, John, totally to his surprise, having been told by God that something light and fluttering would be coming down, looking something like a dove, would go over the massive crowd and rest on someone. It does one day, and lo and behold, it’s his cousin. He is amazed.

This is the man… who is the man that no one ever born of a woman stands higher, and it is the same man to whom God spoke one day and said, “John, Herod the Tetrarch is living in sin. You proclaim my righteous anger against this incestuous sin. Consider not the possibilities of the risk.” And John thunders out indignation against Herod.

One day, the crowds are broken up, the soldiers come in, John is chained, and he is dragged off. He’s taken to the palace that sits on a high cliff, and then down some precarious steps deep into the bowels of the earth, and he is thrown into a pit. And there he lives, chained with his feet in slimy water, fungi growing on the wall, yeast-smelling air. There he sits, and there he rots. Eventually, some of his disciples are allowed to come to him, and they begin telling him what his cousin’s doing.

Do you know what his cousin’s doing? Do you know what his cousin is doing? Well, it’s shocking what his cousin is doing, and it’s not what John expected. When John started preaching, word got out that anybody living that severely and fasting that much and praying that much, someone like that had to have a demon. “John’s got a demon” was the word of the Pharisees.